


Dance Me To The End of Love

by Darkest_Sun



Series: Romance in Every Measure (Blupjeans ficlets) [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Barry and Lup dance together because i say so, F/M, Ficlet, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Music, Non-Linear Narrative, Spoilers for Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Spoilers for Episode: e067-069 Story and Song Parts 1-3, This is now a collection of ficlets, dealing with dissociation, i think that music would be important to both of them, just little spoilers for what the setting implies, music as a lifeline, my second ever published fic whoo, not really a songfic but still giving me those 2000s feels, portrayal of mental illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-03-06 08:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18847426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkest_Sun/pseuds/Darkest_Sun
Summary: Love can take a lifetime. It can be a huge thing and a small thing at the same time.Barry and Lup said a thousand words with music at the Legato Conservatory, but there were so many other times that music spoke the words they couldn't.This is a series of connected, non-chronological, and slightly experimental Blupjeans ficlets, centred around their love of music (and each other).All of these fics are inspired by a different verse from Leonard Cohen's 'Dance Me To The End of Love', and all the titles are from songs.





	1. Dance Me To The End of Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup spent a very long time trapped, without a voice, without a body, without her family.  
> Sometimes she forgets that she has those things back.
> 
>  
> 
> (This was inspired by the Leonard Cohen song of the same title - the first verse basically grabbed my hands and forced me to write this.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE BE WARNED this chapter explicitly deals with and details dissociation, as I can only imagine what being trapped with no physical form would do to a person.  
> As I haven't personally been trapped inside my own magical weapon, this is based off my overactive imagination and experiences with dissociation.
> 
> This is unbeta'd because I honestly was not planning on publishing this.

“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love”

 

 

 

It’s dark in here. It has always been dark. Hasn’t it?

 

Wasn’t it light, once? Wasn’t there heat, and flame, and life?

 

But not here.

 

Here, she is trapped, and she can’t see. Can’t feel.

 

Wait.

 

Through the spinning of her mind, she hears the notes played on the wind. Notes that hold the shape of a lifetime’s worth of love.

 

A melody so huge it could encompass several lifetimes of love. A tune so full it could hold words unspoken over decades.

  
But there is something missing.

 

Those notes were not meant to be played alone, they lacked part of their shape and depth. They could not reach as high nor go so long as they were supposed because they were missing… They were incomplete...

 

Without the other part.

 

She needed to tell him. Tell him he was missing the other part of the melody, the other half of this love.

 

But she couldn’t tell him from in here. In here, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell people things they desperately needed to know.

 

Like: that they were not alone. Were never alone.

 

Oh Gods.

 

She was alone.

 

 

 

 

Somehow, though the music never changed, the something about the quality of the notes was different now.

 

They had a mechanical quality now, they weren’t quite as _here_ as moments ago.

 

She doesn’t know what part of her could recognise a small difference in note quality. Are there any parts of her?

 

Then there is sensation. A feeling.

 

She doesn’t have a name for it. But she did.

 

It feels like... something. Something _on her_ , that exists _outside_ of _her_.

 

It feels like. Touch.

 

Something lifting, turning, holding.

 

Holding her. There is a _her_ to _hold_.

 

There is someone to hold her.

 

Just like there was a second part of the melody that needed something else (it needed _her_ ).

 

The music still wants something from her, still needs her to complete the second part, differently now.

 

It is no longer missing the other half of its melody, but it still moves through her, asking her for something.

 

She feels _hands_ on _her_. She feels _her hands_ on _someone_.

 

She is not alone.

 

And now she is moving. Because the music wants her to move. Because she needs to be the second part to whoever is holding her.

 

Her _back_ is warm where a hand holds her.

 

Her _hands_ are warm where they hold a shoulder, and another hand.

 

Her _feet_ are cold where they move over the floor, her _legs_ grow warm as they carry her _body_ around in steps she knew but didn’t know.

 

Her _ears_ move as they hear the music playing, telling her when the beats are, when to place her feet somewhere new.

 

Her _heart_. Hot, pounding much too fast, making her dizzy.

 

Her _love_. In her arms, holding her, not letting her fall. Never letting her fall.

 

She dances until her feet are sore, until she knows they are real, that she is real.

 

That the floor beneath her is real.

 

And when she opens her eyes, he is real too.

 

And she is not alone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (N.B. Lup hears the notes change when Barry stops playing his piano part and puts on a recorded version. They have a magically recorded version because I say so, and they like to dance to it.)


	2. It's Familiar (But Not Too Familiar)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They spent a year pouring their hearts and souls into a piece of music, creating an audible manifestation of their love for each other.
> 
> Barry Has Some Feelings during this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not new, this has already been published as it's own ficlet, but I've decided to run this as chapters of the same fic. Next one will be up in a sec!

“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in

Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance me to the end of love”

 

 

Making music with Lup felt… familiar.

 

To be fair, many things with Lup felt familiar - forty-seven years was a long time to know someone.

 

But making music with her reminded him of being in the Starblaster lab, working together, sometimes separately, but always eventually coming together, like a dance.

 

Sometimes there was a manic energy to their dance of discovery; fueled by too many late nights, too wired to sleep, too excited by the newest revelation.

 

(She was always a revelation to him)

 

Other times, it was a seamless and well-practiced movement; them orbiting around each other, bouncing ideas off one another, two halves of a perfect unit.

 

Their music felt like that.

 

They would share notes, ideas, snatches of melody, and the other would understand instantly, building and growing from those small ideas.

 

 

Some nights were filled right up until sunrise with ideas and sections played over and over until that euphoric moment when it felt  _right._

 

(She always felt euphoric. She always felt  _right_.)

 

When he played, he felt like he was a part of the music as much as it was a part of him.

 

And when he was part of it, he was truly half of a whole, made complete and somehow  _more_ than he could ever be on his own by her notes as they swirled gently around his.

 

Their melodies tangled around each other the way he wished their hands could.

 

But they could play neither piano nor violin one-handed.

 

(He would try, for her)

 

When they finished practising, the music followed them out into the cool night.

 

Playing gently in his head, whispering around his hands.

 

(He couldn’t tell if they ached more to keep playing or to finally hold her)

 

(He was lying, he could tell)

 

Sometimes he played a wrong note, but it never felt like a wrong note when it was followed by the tune of Lup’s cackling laugh.

 

The first time a string broke, she had looked at her violin as if surprised and offended by its audacity to interrupt their music.

 

He had laughed so hard his head hit the keys and mashed a terrible chord, making them both laugh even more.

 

Never did these things feel like mistakes, or errors. Only part of this familiar process of dance and discovery, trial and error, back and forth.

 

And when,

 

Finally,

 

They shared their music with the audience,

 

(With each other)

 

It felt:

 

Euphoric,

 

Electric,

 

Inevitable.

 

Like making a discovery that he had known for a long, long time.

 

And it felt familiar.


	3. Our Little Corner of the Universe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the worlds they end up on are empty, lifeless, dark.
> 
> Somehow, none of that matters when they're together.

“Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love”

 

 

There were no stars.    
  


The sky was empty and so was the ground.    
  


No waters to reflect back the void above. No wind to rustle the plants that weren't there.   
  


And in the endless darkness, a fire threw the only light.    
  


In it: a little bubble of life, big enough for two, illuminating just a small corner of the endless nothing that was all around.    
  


The flames were an anomaly in an otherwise barren landscape.    
  


They were dancing, alive, full of endless brightness and movement. 

But Barry is not looking at the fire; he is focused on all the brightness and movement contained somehow in the woman holding him, as they dance to the sound of the fire crackling.

For a moment; glittering orange fragments of heat halo her, a crown of sparks which exists only for a moment, thrown into the sky by the fire behind her. 

They move before the sparks have had time to fade. Another twirl, and her face is half-illuminated in that same burning orange, the only point of light against the vast and empty sky behind her.

They turn again, and she pulls him close, before spinning fast around him like a whirlwind of fire he can’t wait to be burned by.

The non-existent space between them feels heavy with gravity, and always when they step apart for a moment to carve a wider circle with their bodies, they come back together in a soft collision.

They dance to no music, orbiting loosely around the only bright point for as far as even an elf’s eyes could see.

It made sense to Barry, that Lup’s fire had become the singular light on a world emptier and darker than any before it.

After all, she had done the same to his life.

His life had stars now, vibrant people who made the dark parts beautiful and bearable. 

This world had no stars. Only the two of them, dancing under the shroud of a dark planet which was cold and empty but for the heat of the fire and between them.

They could have been the only people in the universe.

At the very least, Barry knows, they are the only people on this planet. The only other living creatures now miles up in the sky, sleeping on their familiar ship rather than this desolate world.

But there had been  _ something _ intriguing about being truly, completely alone.

That  _ something _ feels real, here, as he watches the firelight pass over Lup’s face in phases, never quite illuminating the whole picture.

As if he didn’t know every plane of her face.

As if he didn’t know each angle and slope by touch, by memory.

She was written into his bones.

She made his breath quicken and his heart race. And though he had neither breath nor heart in some cycles, she made him feel as though he did. Made him wish that he did.

He couldn’t imagine not having a body right now.

Not only because his heartbeat drums loud in his ears and his body feels too warm from the fire and her hands; but because he couldn’t imagine missing this, the way his every sense is filled.

Barry had his head in the planar system for years before he ever stepped onto a silver ship; was constantly in his mind, thinking about a dozen things at once. Right now, he couldn’t remember ever being more present in his body.

It doesn’t matter that it’s cold and dark. It could never be either of those things with Lup in his arms.

It doesn’t matter that there’s no music. He couldn’t hear their song playing so much as  _ feel _ it when they moved; as if they were playing it with their bodies.

He wonders how this planet could remain unchanged, how everything out there could still be silent and uncaring in the face of this little corner of the world being so filled with heat and life.

For Barry, changing the very nature of his soul had been nothing compared to the way it had been changed already.

She had changed him by  _ being _ .

He moves with her, adrift but never lost, held steady by her arms and her gaze.

The fire slowly burns down, seen only in reflections and the shrinking light thrown, because no eyes turn to watch it.

Things cannot burn constant forever. 

They have to change, or burn out.

Barry is not afraid of burning out; not this kind of heat, not this kind of love.

But as he watches the dying fire reflected in Lup’s fiery eyes, he sees the heat in them change with it.

Feels the gravity between them pulling them closer; sinking them to their knees, to the ground, to each other. 

Feels her pulling him closer; and he has never felt less alone in his life, here on this achingly empty planet.

They find that the night air cannot bring its cold to skin too hot to feel it. 

And an entire world blanketed in empty black sky cannot bring its darkness to people who burn together too brightly to see it.

  
He feels, in this moment, that she has taken him to the very end of the universe.    


  
And he would follow her further still. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got unexpectedly written on the bus while listening to 'Nina Cried Power' by Hozier.
> 
> I genuinely love the weird and creative writing that happens when I do these little ficlets, it feels really different to writing my longer, story-driven fics.
> 
> I'd love to know what you thought!


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